To start with

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The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by EMC and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of EMC.
This is my blog, it is not an EMC blog.

June 30, 2012

The new NetWorker.

Back in the mists of time when a few application developers broke off from Sun Microsystems and founded a company they named Legato, their design concept was simple.

‘If the network is the computer, let’s write applications for the network.’

When you consider that computer networking was embryonic, unreliable, incredibly expensive and the desktop PC was still focused on replacing typewriters, this was a radical concept. On a whiteboard filled with ideas they chose to tackle Backup & Recovery with their first network application. What they didn’t count on was Backup & Recovery was field of so much depth they never found the time to write any of the other applications they sketched out during that whiteboarding session.

After a significant development effort NetWorker 1.0, an enterprise backup application for network connected UNIX systems, debuted in 1990. Today Legato and Sun have passed into history, networking has become inexpensive & ubiquitous, UNIX has faded in the face of Windows Server & Linux while everyone talks about living in the post-PC era.

But NetWorker remains.

22 years later at time of writing here we are at the launch of NetWorker 8.0.

A release, which to me is the most important release of NetWorker in a decade. So important because it renews the foundational concepts of a product consisting of millions of lines of code written by countless developers over two decades, while leaving only the most delicate of traces.

What’s linked below are my thoughts, comments and opinions on the release which sets NetWorker up for the next decade. Lets get into it.

Comments

Back in the mists of time when a few application developers broke off from Sun Microsystems and founded a company they named Legato, their design concept was simple.

‘If the network is the computer, let’s write applications for the network.’

When you consider that computer networking was embryonic, unreliable, incredibly expensive and the desktop PC was still focused on replacing typewriters, this was a radical concept. On a whiteboard filled with ideas they chose to tackle Backup & Recovery with their first network application. What they didn’t count on was Backup & Recovery was field of so much depth they never found the time to write any of the other applications they sketched out during that whiteboarding session.

After a significant development effort NetWorker 1.0, an enterprise backup application for network connected UNIX systems, debuted in 1990. Today Legato and Sun have passed into history, networking has become inexpensive & ubiquitous, UNIX has faded in the face of Windows Server & Linux while everyone talks about living in the post-PC era.

But NetWorker remains.

22 years later at time of writing here we are at the launch of NetWorker 8.0.

A release, which to me is the most important release of NetWorker in a decade. So important because it renews the foundational concepts of a product consisting of millions of lines of code written by countless developers over two decades, while leaving only the most delicate of traces.

What’s linked below are my thoughts, comments and opinions on the release which sets NetWorker up for the next decade. Lets get into it.